Early Saturday morning, Sabriya leaves a note for Jan:
“WTTOGOTO☆□”. The last two characters are a star and a square or “box”. So the message reads: “Want to go to Starbox?” And, when we’re all finally awake and dressed, we do in fact go to Starbucks.
The (chum?) salmon are running back up Pipers Creek in Carkeek Park. We make an afternoon visit with Angela’s mom, who’s visiting for a long weekend. (Angela’s dad was here too, but left early this morning.)
We see a lot of salmon flipping and wriggling up the shallow stream. At a confluence of two streams, a dozen or so are waiting to jump a small waterfall on the bigger of the two streams. Liya and Jan watch one large salmon fight its way up the smaller stream, jumping over a low log (some sort of ladder step for the salmon, presumably). A small crowd gathers to cheer it over the next one, but the salmon seems pretty exhausted.
After twenty years of waiting, we can finally get our favorite pizza delivered to our home. Our family loves Pagliacci Pizza, but their closest locations on Capitol Hill don’t deliver to Madison Park. They’ve just opened their newest location in Madison Valley, so we can finally get it delivered. (And so can everyone else around here — tonight there’s quite a wait for delivery.) We’re so happy we take a picture of the delivery guy, who’s pretty amused with all the attention he’s been getting this weekend.
Sometimes the girls spring some craziness on Jan — and it turns out to be some craziness Jan perpetrated on the girls a while ago, but has since forgotten about. Case in point:
Liya: “Which word has the longest sequence of doubled letters?”
Jan: “Bookkeeper” (according to a puzzle Jan read years ago)
Liya: “Nope. It’s ‘coffeeaardvark’!”
While Anya and Liya are with their piano teacher on a sunny Saturday, Bree gets a haircut.
Anya’s 11th birthday party. Her birthday was actually a few weeks ago, but she wanted to wait for a weekend when a large number of friends could join her for a sleepover. We end up hosting seven guests — Ariella, Cordelia, Danica, Elise, Ivy, Jane, and Kaila — for a grand total of ten girls in the house overnight.
For some reason, the party starts out with all the girls making fake mustaches.
Birthday dinner for all the girls is “make your own pizza”, with a wide range of toppings. This turns out to be a big hit: it’s a quick craft project, for one thing, plus everyone gets a pizza they actually want.
Anya and Liya’s school holds their annual Engineering Event. This year the theme is Ferris wheels, and both girls build several Ferris wheels and Ferris wheel-inspired contraptions.
All the kids decorate the “ping-pong people” on their Ferris wheels. This little person was apparently slightly damaged during the construction of the wheel.
Liya with a happier ping-pong person.
After a light lunch, we set aside cooking tasks and push the girls outside for a walk down to the lake. When we come back to the house, it smells sooo good! We are thankful for what we have.
Happy Thanksgiving!
We all go to the King Tut exhibit at the Pacific Science Center. Jan remembers going to the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit in New York as a kid, so it’s fun to bring the girls to see a similar exhibit. After walking through the exhibit, we spend a bit of time at some of the permanent exhibit. The girls are particularly captivated by a large lever that can lift them off the ground.
At a parent-teacher conference for Sabriya today, her preschool teachers said she seems like a natural leader. They related a recent story: one day, it was time for the kids to go outside and play. Sabriya was quick to the door and called to her classmates over her shoulder, “We’re kitties! Let’s go!”, then ran out toward one part of the yard without even bothering to look to see whether anyone was following her. A pack of kids ran off after her.